Does music influence Citizens’ Evaluations of a Candidate?

Emmanuel HeisbourgPhDDepartment of Political Science, Université de MontrealSupervisor: André Blais

I will conduct a study
investigating whether and to what extent music impact citizen’s evaluations of
a candidate. The debate concerning the political influence of music is not a
new one. Devlin (1986, p. 29-30) argues, for example, that music “is often an
integral part of the mood-setting devices of political ads”. Likewise, Thorson et al. (1991) show that music has an influence on
how individuals react to political ads. It remains unknown, however, whether
and to what extent music influences the evaluation of a candidate sponsoring an
ad. This is an important research question, since individuals’ evaluation of a
candidate influences their likelihood of supporting this candidate in a given
election (Hayes, 2005).

For measuring the impact of
music on evaluations of a candidate, I will conduct an experiment in which I
expose participants to a real campaign ad from a local (unknown) candidate.
This candidate is in favor of more public spending in health and education. The
experiment will be composed of two treatment and a control group: In the first treatment
group, the candidate’s proposals are presented in the form of a campaign ad
containing voice, images, and a melancholic song. In the second treatment
group, his proposals are presented without this song. Finally, in the control
group, the message is presented without this song and the images.

Following their exposure to one
of these ads, participants will be invited to answer a survey containing a
battery of questions on how they evaluate the candidate. This includes whether
the candidate is compassionate, honest, etc. (Hayes, 2005). I will also ask
participants how convincing the campaign ad is (for checking the reliability of
the treatment), their overall like or dislike of the candidate, and whether
they would vote for the candidate in an election, as well as their
partisanship, political ideology, and gender. These last measures will be used
as control variables in the analysis. I will conduct this experiment with 192 students
from McGill (64 in each group) at the Center’s Media Lab. As such, I will be
capable of capturing a mean difference of 0.5 in the main dependent variables (regarding
candidate evaluations).

I hypothesize that:

H1: Participants in the voice-images-music
condition will evaluate the candidate as being more compassionate and honest
(for instance), than participants in the other treatment (voice-images) and in
the control group.

H2: Participants in the voice-images condition will evaluate the candidate as being more compassionate and honest (for instance), than participants in the control group, but less than participants in the other treatment (voice-images-music) group.